their outfits and knew an instant later that they were not Donaldson’s ladies. He turned to Begg and saw that he had come to the same conclusion. Soon the streets would be crawling with men and women in their finest clothes, sporting parasols and the latest Brazilian and Panama hats. He had delegated to one of his stock boys the task of flicking the switch at midnight to power his New Year’s display. If he left now, if he could shake Josephine Strachan, he could avoid the crowds, the tally-keeping, the lies of omission, the revelry of people looking forward without a single fear in their hearts.
‘I suppose there’s little point in holding a grudge,’ Begg said.
Colton Kemp said nothing. He turned his back on his boss and began to walk the mile and a half back to his secluded property, hauling his earthly form as if it were an engine coupled to a dozen freight carriages, every step a fresh battle with inertia. Josephine followed a few yards behind, in silence this time. He would later wonder why she clung to him. What was it she detected?
Eventually she left him, taking the path that ran beside the swamp back to the schoolhouse.
He worried what she would tell her parents when she got home. Not that he had grabbed her by the shoulder, threatened her, but that he had been walking around the town that afternoon as his wife lay dead. Because the news would have to come out. Tomorrow, if he could face it.
Flossie spied him as he walked up their long gravel driveway and ran out to meet him.
‘Oh, Col,’ she said, ‘I’m so glad you came back.’
She lured him inside, fed him, hardly spoke. She had coped well enough. As well as could be expected. Still, the house rang with cries and he found that he couldn’t sleep in his bed that night, that it was rendered incomplete without a counterbalance, his counterbalance. He soon gave in to his restlessness and stalked to his workshop, lit the lamp and saw the bloody comet trail leading from the base of Ursula, stolid and incomplete, to the heavy barn door. From the muddle of his tool bench, he selected the hatchet he used to chip away large amounts of wood at the start of a new project. Clenching the haft in his right hand, he realised this is how he had felt since the morning: tense beyond all reason but with none of the release of a sweetly placed stroke. Faster than thought, he drove the hatchet into Ursula’s unfinished head, braining her as if it were a tomahawk. He had to place his free hand on the figure’s right shoulder to free the bit from the wood before swinging again. This next stroke knocked a wedge free from Ursula’s head and the heavy wooden form toppled back, coming to rest awkwardly with a trestle against its rump. He turned, eyeing each of the misshapen forms that remained upright before hurling the hatchet end over end into the head of Mavis and her overlarge mouth.
He left the barn, forgetting it would be dark out, and fumbled around the lean-to where he stacked his firewood, searching for his father’s heavy, cumbrous axe.
By sunrise he had reduced the mannequins in his workshop to lengths of firewood for the range.
The occasional hand or foot sticking out of the woodpile would unnerve poor Flossie in the coming weeks, but that next morning she bit her bottom lip and placed a firm hand on his shoulder to rouse him. He uncurled from beneath his tool bench, still clasping his father’s axe. She looked into his red-rimmed eyes.
‘Col, I need you to get some things from town. For the babies.’
In which the acolyte makes himself at home
Jesse lay awake as the sun cut through the thin bed sheets that were hung as curtains in his room at the Criterion Hotel. His chest felt expanded and he pumped it like a bellows, lying on his back and watching his breastbone rise and fall. He had hardly slept but his head felt clear. He knew that next to him lay Julia—dear, plump, motherly Julia—that she was a prostitute and that he was no longer a virgin. These facts became soft at the edges and crumbled when he tried to set the night’s events in order. Had one of his new friends paid for Julia or had she too been placed on his account (which of course was Mr Rickards’ account)? Ah, he didn’t care. To Rickards he was a delivery boy, a tagalong. To the people of Marumaru he was a herald, a saviour.
Julia lifted herself onto an elbow and said, ‘You know, love, it’s not every man I let kip beside me.’
‘Was I making too much noise?’
‘Not half,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’
‘You’ve got your own room for huffin’ and puffin’.’
‘My—?’ So this wasn’t his room. He was unaccustomed to the liberties the drink had taken with his memory. All the same, he found it hard to muster any regret that he’d strayed from Sandow’s path of moderation.
Julia sat up completely now, making no attempt to shield her large pink breasts with the white sheet. He felt himself get hard again, though there was a dead ache that had not been there last night, an ache he revelled in, the way his muscles used to ache when he started following Sandow’s System.
She reached out her hand to pat him on the cheek. ‘There’s a good boy,’ she said, motherly once more, and it set his cock throbbing.
Down the hall, he walked several circuits around his room, laughing to himself and throwing his hands in the air as a maniac might, before stripping to his underwear and settling down to his exercises. He began with the Sandow Spring-Grip Dumb-bell, slowly clenching and unclenching his fist and curling the small weight up to his chin. Ten with the left, ten with the right, thinking all the time about his breathing, his new expanded lungs, the muscles of the chest, the biceps, the triceps, the wrist. He then brought his arm to his chest and extended it in an arc, as if opening a casement window. Ten with the left, ten with the right. On he worked through Sandow’s routine, slowly, never taxing a muscle too greatly, never expending excessive energy, focusing his brain in a way that had become second nature to him. He rigged his Sandow Developer to the door and began working his back. He kept noticing muscles he might not normally feel, ones he had employed with Julia. The thrusting fibres in his buttocks. The lower calf that had held him on his tiptoes as long as he wanted and needed. The toes that had grasped for traction on the wooden floor.
After his exercises, he took his sponge to the communal bathroom. He did not fill the heavy grey tub with cold water and fully immerse as Sandow’s gospel dictated. He never followed this step at home or when working out with Jarrett. Instead he stepped out of his underpants and soaked the sponge in cool water and proceeded to dab his warm, twitching body with the vital substance.
He dressed once more in his only outfit—short-sleeved shirt, brown waistcoat and thick canvas trousers—donned his cap and headed downstairs. It had just gone seven o’clock and the dining room was empty. The dark carpet of the hall smelt of spilt ale and sawdust. He took a seat at the bar and was happy enough to sit there and read the names on the liquor bottles.
‘After the hair of the dog that bit you, eh?’ said a voice from behind him. He turned and saw the publican, Ed Coughlin, who slowly made his way around the bar.
‘Sorry?’
‘You after a drink, sir?’
Jesse smiled. He was still a sir the morning after, though Coughlin forever looked on the verge of winking.
